I just read Roopika Risam’s great discussion of the controversy surrounding UIUC‘s recension of their hire offer to Dr. Steven Salaita due to inflammatory tweets he posted. (Hint: you should read it too!). Her analysis of the shocking response by Cary Nelson is important as well. As someone who watch Nelson’s 2007 debates with David Horowitz, read both his Manifesto of a Tenured Radical and No University is an Island, and was extremely excited to see him speak at the University of Florida when I was a graduate student, I have to say that Nelson is probably the main reason I became interested in academic labor issues. So, it isn’t without regret that I repeat what one of my colleagues said on Twitter. It seems Nelson only cares about academic freedom when he agrees with the message.
Nelson’s disingenuous remarks about peer-review also underscored for me how little he understands scholarly communication in the twenty-first century. “If Salaita had limited himself to expressing his hostility to Israel in academic publications subjected to peer review,” Nelson argues, “I believe the appointment would have gone through without difficulty.” Many of the defenses of Salaita, AAUP’s for instance, focus on pedagogical concerns but leave somewhat untouched issues of research. Given this disconnect, and the essential nature of Twitter to digitally-inflected fields like Computers and Writing, the digital humanities, and media studies, it is vitally important that scholars and Universities adopt an updated sense of academic freedom with regard to controversial research. So, I will draw from some philosophical concepts that, I hope, can contextualize the need for this expanded sense of academic freedom.
I am a big fan of Derrida‘s work regarding the university without conditions. Derrida argues that the modern University “claims and to be granted in principle, besides what is called academic freedom, an unconditional freedom to question and to assert, or even, going still further, the right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge, and thought concerning the truth” (24). Of course, this is a utopian idea, and Derrida is the first to admit it. However, he argues, “in principle and in conformity to its declared vocation, its professed essence, it should remain the ultimate place of critical resistance — and more than critical — to all the powers of dogmatic and unjust appropriation” (25-6). Even if, Derrida says, the University will never be a place where the search for truth has no conditions, this ideal should be the space of resistance against dogmatic powers that attempt to argue for silencing or censuring or limiting this search.
Derrida draws off of the work of Kant, who argues that the unconditional freedom for philosophical disciplines is ensured precisely due to what is, in the words of Hent de Vries, “a ‘freedom’ of judgment exercised strictly within the confines of the academic parliament and the limited ‘public sphere’ of its learned community” (42). The performative contradiction of academic freedom theorized by Kant ensures 1) the relative autonomy of philosophy to seek truth unencumbered by concerns that influence more “practical” fields like economics or medicine; but also 2) the idea that peer-review establishes the community of scholars and that this process is what also articulates the limits of the aforesaid autonomy.
Nelson’s comments do draw from a tradition, but it is a tradition that is also being challenged by new communication technologies. The humanities must theorize a new basis for academic freedom: one that takes into consideration the need of scholars to remain unencumbered in their search for truth, but that also contextualizes this search with reference to social media, the realms of activism and service-learning, and the so-called public humanities. Ted Underwood remarked in a Facebook conversation that “[i]n some ways, moves like this ask professors to think of themselves as *analogous* to journalists. In other words, there’s an expectation that we monitor our personal remarks so as to preserve the institution’s posture of public neutrality on controversial issues.” Ted’s insight is very true. But administrations who dole out these punishments don’t seem to understand that journalistic freedom (based upon institutionally-derived ethics of neutrality) is very different from academic freedom. Scholars do not represent institutions. They represent truth and critical resistance.
Works Cited
Jacques Derrida. “The future of the profession or the university without condition (thanks to the “Humanities,” what could take place tomorrow).” Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader. Ed. Tom Cohen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 24-47. Print.
Hent de Vries. Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Print.